Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

When medical science runs its course, we desperately pursue other pathways to healing. Such was the case with my grandmother. After being released from the hospital with a terminal illness, she handed my grandfather a list of herbs to purchase at Harry’s Occult & Spiritual Shop on South Street in Philadelphia. My grandfather took me along.

The pharmacy, founded in 1917, started as an old-style apothecary, but Harry began shifting his business to serve black migrant Southerners and their requests for powders and oils. It was still a thriving business when I was a kid. I marveled at the skulls throughout the shop, the bottles neatly organized in front of wooden cabinets.

In a moment of desperation, my grandmother, who was a staunch Christian, embraced the old traditions of her ancestors. If you go back, every culture has its folkways—charms, balms, and practices—meant to ward off evil or bring healing. My grandmother concocted some medicinal elixir. She survived her cancer another eighteen months. I cannot confidently point to her tinctures. I’m just happy we had her a little longer.

But then of course, there are the swindlers, those who seek to profit off the desperation of the ill and dying by offering fake cures. Today’s poignant narrative poem highlights the extent of our vulnerability when we wish to save those we love.

Placebo
by Preeti Vangani

What sits like grief in my throat about that time 
my parents were on a train back home 
from an appointment with the oncologist, 
although when the patient is metastatic, the visit 
should really be called disappointment, is not
that they were so easily swindled, became targets, 
or their fear was preyed upon, by a man who 
perhaps judging by Mummy’s scarved head, sold, 
no, souled them an untraditional remedy, a powder 
made of herbs with twenty-four carat gold dust, 
proven to work, just mix in water, get your life 
back, the man whispered as the train 
hiccuped; now, my father is not gullible but imagining 
an empty bed while Mummy already shrinking in it
must have relaxed his rationality and I wonder 
if it was a rhyming image of her recovery he saw
in a dream—a rhythmic shimmer of leaves or scallops 
of lace in her dupatta waltzing in the wind—or was it 
the simple, electric restlessness of a sleepless man, 
that convinced Papa to phone the crook, trade thick 
bundled cash for a polythene packet of coarse crumbles, 
even if a jeweller later confirmed the gold was obviously
fake, what sits like grief within me is not conjuring 
the mathematical castles Papa sketched around that 
drowned money: paint job, new tiles, mutual funds or what 
my mother dreamed up for it: a fully automatic washing 
machine, a hanging macrame swing in the balcony; rather 
what stings is that Mummy who otherwise Einsteined 
our kitchen’s hundred spices and seeds into antidotes 
for our ailments, then, stirring the spoon round and round 
in the steel glass, gulped that concoction of glittering dust 
and desperation, and what transpired back and forth 
between her resigned chin and his optimistic gaze in that 
moment—like the saffron crackles of the fire around which 
they were once wedded, those momentary dots of blaze 
that were suspended in celebratory air—were golden speckles 
of hope’s flyaways. Flaming hot, binding, disappearing.

"Placebo" by Preeti Vangani. Used by permission of the poet.